ABSTRACT
To desire is necessarily to exist in a state of fantasy: it is to entertain the possibility of obtaining something one does not have power, love, adventure. This chapter looks at the recolonization of one particular hard-boiled genre, the Western, by women writers of romance fiction. In The Cowboy and His Lady and other novels like it, the emphasis lies on commitment, on expressing desire but also on remaking the American family. But this dual necessity itself precipitates a series of problems. There is a superficial merging of genders, responsibilities and behaviours, and yet naturalized divisions are also maintained: women romance writers have both subverted and affirmed the traditional Western. A woman should not love a cowboy because he will move on, because he is inimical to a woman's domestic interests. However, the message from Jesse DuKore's novel as much as from the 'Western Lovers' series is that the ideal is always in part inimical, irreducibly other.
